Posts Tagged 'Cloud Platform'

Those of us who've been in this industry for years have seen computing evolve pretty significantly, especially recently. We started with dedicated servers running a single operating system, and we were floored by innovations that allowed dedicated servers to run a hypervisor with many operating systems. The next big leap brought virtual machine "cloud" instances into the spotlight ... And the resulting marketing shenanigans have been a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, the approachable "cloud" term is a lot easier to talk about with a nontechnical audience, but on the negative side, we see uninformative TV commercials that leverage cloud as a marketing term, and we see products that further obfuscate what cloud technology actually means:

To make sure we're all on the same page, as we continue to talk about "cloud," our definition is pretty straightforward:

It's an operations model.

It provides capacity on demand.

It offers consumption-based pricing.

It features self-service provisioning.

It can be accessed and managed via an API.

Understanding those characteristics, when you hear about cloud in the hosting industry, you're usually hearing about cloud computing instances in a public cloud environment. An instance in a public cloud is one of many instances operating on a shared cloud infrastructure alongside other similar instances that aren't managed by you. Your data is still secure, and you can still get good performance in a public cloud environment, but you're not managing the cloud infrastructure on which your instance resides ... You're using a piece of a cloud.

What we announced at Cloud Expo East is the next step in the evolution of technology in our industry ... We're providing a turnkey, on-demand way for our customers to provision their own Private Clouds with Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack.

You don't get a piece of the cloud. You have your own cloud, provisioned in a matter of hours on a month-to-month contract.

For those who have looked into building a private cloud for their business in the past, it's probably worth reiterating: With SoftLayer and CloudStack, you can have a geographically distributed, secure, private cloud environment provisioned in a matter of hours (not months). Given the complexity of a private cloud environment — involving a management server, private cloud zones, host servers and object storage — this is no small feat.

Those unbelievable provisioning times are only part of the story ... When that cloud infrastructure is deployed quickly, it's fully integrated into the SoftLayer platform, so it leverages our global private network alongside your existing bare metal, dedicated and virtual servers. Want to add public cloud instances to your private cloud as web heads? You'll log into one portal or use a singular API to have that done in an instant.

Your own cloud infrastructure, fully integrated into SoftLayer's global infrastructure. If you're chomping at the bit to try it out for yourself, email us at privateclouds@softlayer.com, and we'll get you on the "early access" list.